Bay 12 Games Forum

If you press 'I' to check the zone it will tell you how many clay tiles are in it. You only ever need one zone.

You should also check to make sure your kiln isn't set up to only take from certain stockpiles. Any time I have a problem with a workshop refusing to acknowledge a resource I have, it's usually a problem with me designating it to only take from one or two stockpiles, probably to prevent my dwarves from running all over the fort spending ages hauling stone when there are perfectly good stone stock piles 5 feet from the workshops.

I have a fortress that I haven't been to in awhile, and I wanted to commission about 20 statues of fortress history, but I've forgotten what the name of my Fortress actually is and don't know how to look it up. Any suggestions?

After around 120+ hours in DF, I now know enough about what I'm doing to actually start having Fun without dying to other civilizations or random werebeast attacks. So I made a world with max savagery and large beasts and placed my fort on the border of a Jungle biome, a Forest, and a Lake. I am now attempting to tame random creatures so that I can have great pets and some exotic meats.

So far I have tamed (but not domesticated) a standard jaguar, 2 cougars, a coyote, and some capybaras (which I thought was a fantasy creature like a Fluffy Wambler until I looked it up). There are some giant boars on my map, which I would love to tame for some meat, but they aren't near any of my cage traps. I have also seen a lone tiger, but like the boars they weren't near my base.

So yeah, just me experimenting with the finer points of DF after mastering the basics. I still don't fully understand how water or power work, and the minecart page on the forum looks like someone's college report in civil engineering. But I trust that I will get there someday!

Cut down the tree the dwarf is in. If your Dwarves are going to die of thirst/starvation up there anyway, you may as well try to get them down and have some of them live. Even if they wind up with broken bones, or get unlucky and break their neck, you'll lose less dwarves than if you leave them up there. Although, if your military keeps getting stuck in trees while chasing flying things, then cutting them down is the easiest option as they'll have metal armor and are far less likely to get injured from falls because of how the game calculates fall damage (basically takes a chunk of whatever you land on and gives you a smack with it).

But yeah, this is an issue. Although, I usually wind up solving it by just deforesting the zone immediately around my fort. It's not like the elves have ever been a threat to anyone with steel armor barring unlucky shots to the eyes.

This thread is for dumb questions, observations, and thoughts that have no effect on gameplay, but you wonder about them anyway. The paradoxes of the Dwarf Fortress universe, if you will. I'll start.

• If lakes, Oceans, and rivers freeze in winter, and anything in them becomes encased in ice and dies, why aren't fish endangered?
• When a dwarf in a mood makes a jade bed, does he magically grow the gem and then cut it into a full bed, or is the bed really tiny and the dwarf that sleeps in it just pretends it's full size?
• Vampires can't drink alcohol, yet they still get alcohol withdrawal.

edit - Checked legends
◾9 Dwarves
◾4 Humans
Other Populations
◾37 Animated Elves
◾13 Animated Dwarves

Does the game even consider that enough of an enemy population to send sieges? I've never thought about what the minimum enemy population must be to send a siege, I just know your fortress population must be 80 by default to trigger a siege or titan attack. I'm pretty sure it's not on the wiki anywhere. But since Toady himself made sieges make more sense than before, I think there must be one. Actual members from the enemy civ have to be drafted into the military and march across the map now, which implies that they must exist in the first place. I'm not sure a tiny town of necromancers would siege you. It wouldn't make sense for a tiny population of 60 individuals to send 2/3 of their population to die against your fort and then be murdered by a forgotten beast while their 'military' was gone. But the AI does lots of other stupid stuff, I mean, this is the same AI that players routinely abuse with trap corridors; so maybe I'm overthinking this.

Depends on what they were doing. If there's nothing in the combat log, check your food/drink stocks and see if your dwarves have an unimpeded path to them. Failing that, you could have a vampire, but buggy pathfinding is the most likely culprit. You'd think the most common cause of death would be combat in Dwarf Fortress. But for me it's actually my dwarves climbing trees to try to attack a barn owl or something, then being unable to get back down without someone chopping down a tree, and finally dehydrating/starving to death. A close second is Dwarves chasing things into pools and drowning. The 3rd most likely cause of dwarven deaths are people using the architecture in ways for which they were never intended; like jumping down wells, or ignoring that low traffic path and getting run over by a minecart, or jumping/getting knocked off ledges by people/monsters/idiocy/etc.

If your dwarves are getting stuck in trees, cut down the trees periodically, it's not like the elves and their wooden armor have ever been a serious threat to anyone. If your dwarves keep drowning you might want to create your own, artificial pool where they won't be interrupted by things and forget to to paddle (or whatever). If you have dwarves just getting killed by random creatures/monsters/etc. then limiting the time they spend outside with burrows and other such things is a good idea. If you have a vampire look for the dwarf with the thought "Urist McVampire was horrified after seeing Urist McVampireChow die" as that's a dead giveaway that they did it. Or if the vampire has been in your fort a long time, look for the dwarf thinking about not having alcohol in a long time. Vampires can't drink alcohol, but still get alcohol withdrawal; because of course they do.